It was a puzzle—Florence to be so keenly felt as to retain her pictured form in absence. Theodosia ran swiftly with the spring. Her long slender legs delighted in the daily walk, and in a few weeks there would be tennis on the courts at the Seminary. Stiggins spread onto her mind once as a flat unrecognized affront. Walking past the stable swiftly one bright day she saw his hand as it bent over the collar of a mule to slip a pad into place, a long slender hand, powerful and cunning, like her own hand but more powerful and more steadily placed to its task. The tawny fingers dragged knowingly over the buckles of the collar and then his face, viewed momentarily, was searched carelessly in the swift moment of a passing. “Between thee and me there is a great gulf fixed,” she thought, and the hour swept quickly by, having gathered nothing from the moment which was dominated by the dark accidental hand. Florence Agnew grew daily into a personality, heard and felt as well as seen. Hers was a sensual voice, heavy with tone, low, trailing away into finalities. Her body was luxury-loving and radiantly indolent, using but a modicum of its intense vitality for her goings and comings. Her perfect teeth flashed their smile from between her rippling lips and she was alive to the ends of her animal being, which was set to have the best of the town for its own. Her hair was puffed and curled to be a gauze of rippling midnight over her head. * * * * * Jane Moore could do nothing with the Bach. She shook her head self-indulgently at the piano arrangement as if the music were some light joke to confound the keyboard. She touched a key here and there with her fingers but in the end she shrugged as if Bach were a responsibility she could not be asked to assume. Her hat was bright for the spring that delayed, out-dating the spring with its flowers and fragile crêpe. She wanted to talk of Florence continually, and she quoted her with an admiration which would fall suddenly under amused contempt or shock but would build itself back again in the charm of the unfamiliar. She went daily where Florence went, or she would retail to Theodosia the witty sayings and bold sallies that issued from the flame around which she was impelled to hover. The days went hurriedly, the birds in the trees at dawn making a continuous breathless fluting, the mockingbird loudest and most insistent. Albert had gone far into the country, traveling from farm to farm, visiting the smaller villages, or he made farther journeys into outlying counties. Theodosia played trills looking at her thin lips in the tall glass of the parlor, searching her lips and her face there.